Category Archives: Piracy

“If someone copies your game a trillion times you won’t have a single lost cent. Some people are using that to ruin the internet. I still think piracy is wrong, but [it's on] the level of wrong me calling my friend an idiot. It’s wrong, but it’s such a minor thing. It’s ridiculously small.” – Markus “Notch” Persson to PC Gamer.

Measures put in place for game cartridges for PlayStation Vita will project the handheld “long term” from piracy, SCE WWS US boss Scott Rhode has said.

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Angry Birds developer Rovio’s boss feels that piracy isn’t always bad for business and can actually help in building an entertainment brand.

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The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings isn’t jumping to consoles to escape piracy; CD Projekt just trusts you all to fork over your cash in return for a fair deal.

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DRM is a waste of money, doesn’t work, and worst of all, so 2003, according to Paradox Interactive CEO Fred Wester.

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BlueByte has removed the component in its Tages DRM, which logged hardware changes on a user’s PC, thus using up one of the limited activations allowed for Anno 2070. According to a developer statement provided to Guru3D, “the graphics hardware from the hash used to identify the PC” was removed, which means you can now “switch the GFX as many times” as you want in your PC. At first, Anno players thought there was an error in the DRM causing the issue, but Ubisoft said the inclusion was “intentional” and that many users hadn’t experienced a problem with it. Thanks, RPS.

Ubisoft has said good customer support will resolve the few occasions when its Tages DRM affects players.

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TorrentFreak has said the European arms of publishers such as Atari, Codemasters, Square Enix and Ubisoft are targeting pirates by asking them to pay €800 for each title downloaded illegally. According to the torrent site, the publishers are contacting the accused by tracking IP addresses, something CD Projekt stopped doing last week. The issue with tracking IP through torrents is that the majority of clients do not use the customer’s IP address when uploading or downloading. So, while some legitimate pirates could be caught using this method, innocent people could be caught in the middle as well. Thanks Gamefront.

Something of a kerfuffle has broken out – again – over Ubisoft’s ever-troubled DRM policies, which don’t like it when you switch out hardware.

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CD Projekt as decided to “cease identifying and contacting” those it believed had pirated The Witcher II due to concerns expressed by the community.

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Epic Games has stated it does not support the current version of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill drafted by Texas Republican Representative Lamar Smith and 12 co-sponsors.

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Here’s an award Crytek and EA are probably less than happy about.

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CD Projekt CEO Marcin Iwinski has said the firm estimates that The Witcher has been downloaded illegally more than 4.5 million times, and despite this, the developer standes behind its anti-DRM policy.

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The Daily Star reports Iran has instituted a ban on the sale of Battlefield 3 over controversial content set in capital city Iran. EA is actually quite pleased by this turn of events.

“In that Battlefield 3 is not available for purchase in Iran, we can only hope the ban will help prevent pirated copies reaching consumers there,” the publisher told IndustryGamers.

Gabe Newell feels Steam no longer has to compete with pirates thanks to the quality of its service.

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Bohemia Interactive has observed massive piracy of its games, despite an unusual DRM system.

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Research firm Envisional has issued a study which cites a rise in UK game piracy of 20% over the last five years. According to the study, which fails to mention any titles, the “five top games of 2010″ were illegally downloaded through bittorrent clients almost one million times. Meanwhile, illegal downloading of music decreased, while illegal downloading of film and television programming since 2006 was up 30%. Thanks, Develop.

Bohemia Interactive has provided an example of how the FADE copy protection system is used as an anti-piracy measure Take On Helicopters.

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Gabe Newell believes rising game prices isn’t what drives would-be customers to piracy.

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Digital distribution service Good Old Games doesn’t look on other businesses as competitors in the war for PC gamers’ dollars.

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